Featured Author: Vargas

06/24/2016

Manuel hosted a couple of workshop conferences at USF--the one I attended in 2013 was the best conference I've ever attended, largely due to his efforts to make people feel welcome and keeping on schedule (and terrific dinners!)--and I was very impressed by the campus. I along with other Flickerers wish Manuel the best on the move, further loading up the already considerable stress on FW/MR on the southern portions of the San Andreas Fault! (May the punning begin. . .)

06/07/2016

The latest APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy contains a terrific interview with fellow Flickerer Manuel Vargas. Along with some nice revelations about his philosophical biography, it also contains some pretty intriguing reflections about his APA-award winning book Building Better Beings:

12/02/2013

There are new arguments for free will skepticism based on recent findings in neuroscience. For instance, most of you know about a compelling set of data from experiments performed by Benjamin Libet and others (see Bayne and Haggard in Swinburne 2011, as well as the Introduction). In a Libet experiment, a subject is asked to perform some simple motor action, say flexing her wrist, at some particular time of her choosing. The subject is then requested to identify the time at which she is first consciously aware of her decision (or intention) to flex her wrist. Studies reveal preparatory brain activity called a “readiness potential”: a neural event or set of events that precede conscious choice yet is highly correlated with a particular action. Given common sense assumptions, free will appears to be an illusion, for decisions are fixed prior to conscious choice; conscious choice appears to play no role in one’s decisions.

There is much disagreement about what the Libet experiments actually prove and there are several criticisms that one might give to any argument for free will scepticism based on these findings (Balaguer 2010; Bayne 2011; Mele forthcoming and other works). What interests me is whether these findings present a new challenge to free will, something fundamentally different from more traditional challenges resulting from various compatibility problems.

Most philosophers believe that conscious choice has a neurological basis. Thus, there is likely some physical event or set of events in the causal chain leading from the readiness potential to the action that is token identical to the agent’s conscious choice. The view is that this choice is nonetheless bypassed and plays no causal role, so it is no choice at all. Yet why believe that the physical event that is the agent’s conscious choice plays no causal role in the agent’s action?

One way to reach this conclusion is to incorporate a no-choice closure principle. For instance, let Np = p and no one has a choice about whether p; let P0 = readiness potential RP occurs; let P = action A occurs. Here is one way to understand the argument:

NP0

N(P0 --> P)

So, NP

This argument explicitly depends on the no-choice closure principle Beta (van Inwagen 1983). On this telling of the story, it seems like the “new” challenge to free will is not so new after all. At the very least it seems to incorporate a substantive principle used in the consequence argument.

Is there a better way to understand the argument, one that does not rely on no-choice closure principles?

10/30/2013

My thanks to Thomas for inviting me to blog as a “Featured Author,” and my gratitude to all of you who have chimed in this month.

The aim of my final post is to make an observation and to invite some reflection about how our work matters or doesn’t.

First, the observation. One of the nice things about thinking about and teaching the topics of free will and moral responsibility is that we don’t usually have to do a lot of work motivating the stuff we’re interested in, compared to many other philosophers. (Exceptions duly noted.) Free will and moral responsibility just seem to be Obvious Big Deals in ways that lots of other things philosophers are on about don’t seem to be.

This doesn’t seem to stop us from insisting that many of the things that seemed to be the drivers of the Obvious Big Deal-ishness are neither obvious nor big deals (incompatibilism: not so obvious!; predictability: not so obvious!; determinism: not so bad!; no responsibility: not so bad!; skepticism: not really a position!). We too bite the hand that feeds—except libertarians. They are the hands that feed.

Beyond the Big Deal-ish element, I wonder if there are Smaller But Still Fairly Big Deals that follow from or are notable features of given accounts. I suggested one in a previous post: poverty undercuts blameworthiness in various ways). However, I’d love to hear about other ways in which we think our theories (whether yours and someone else’s) has interesting real world implications.

(Except for psychopaths. Those guys get plenty of attention, so put them to the side.)

In brief, do you think our research matters for the real world, beyond the “oh noes! No responsibility!” reaction? If so, how does it make a difference on various Smaller Deals? And don't be bashful—if you think there is something distinctive about your view on this question, let us know because these issues don't get much press, methinks.

10/25/2013

[Thanks to Kelly for the guest post. And thanks to everyone who joined in—don't let this post preclude you from continuing the discussion on the prior post.]

How big a disagreement does the hard incompatibilist need to have with other folks in order to actually have a real position, as opposed to having just articulated a parameter that most of us can work around? (In what follows I'm primarily interested in moral responsibility; mileage may vary if you focus on various notions of free will.)

I take it that the intro course version of the "no-free will/no moral responsibility" view is usually presented as a view with dramatic consequences. (There is inevitably at least one student who is an enthusiastic proponent of the view, declaring that “No one is ever responsible! No can be blamed for what they do! It is false than anyone ever deserves blames!”). And, I take it that the citation data I mentioned earlier (see also Eddy’s numbers in the comments) strongly suggests that “no free will/no MR” views are generally regarded as indisputably Big Deals.

However, one of the intriguing features about many real world hard incompatibilist views is how much they are prepared to step away from the crude “everything goes!” picture suggested by That Student. For example, El Pereboom has been very careful to insist that the kind or form of responsibility he thinks we don’t have is of the “basic desert” variety* and he seems prepared to grant that there are pretty substantial non-basic desert bases for practices in place. Similarly, although Galen Strawson is famously identified with hard incompatibilism, his view has an interesting accommodation of compatibilism in various forms. And, of course, Saul Smilansky and Ted Honderich have, in different ways, argued for partial accommodations of some compatibilist dimensions of our existing practices. Finally, even plenty of libertarians are prepared to acknowledge that large swaths of responsibility practices would remain intact even if we lacked libertarian agency (Bob Kane and Dan Speak, among others, have been explicit about this).

So here’s the rub: As grounds for a distinctive view, one deserving an airing in the inevitable “here are the basic options in the literature” lectures, would the discovery that 5% of our practices is normatively and/or metaphysically indefensible be a position rather than simply a parameter on what we expect accounts to deliver?

I’m inclined to think that almost all of us are committed to thinking it is the latter. In what follows, I say why, focusing on the moral responsibility axis of the discussion.

10/15/2013

A recent correspondence with the always thoughtful Justin Capes made me reflect on the options for those who would like to sidestep the compatibility debate. One way to sidestep the compatibility debate is to just declare that one’s allegiance and move on. But that’s not so much a side-stepping as a taking a side. So what other options are there?

Here are the two options that came up in our conversation:

Agnostic Autonomism: This is the well known view of Al Mele’s on which one is agnostic about the compatibility debate, but on which one judges that it is more plausible that we have responsibility than not, so one goes on to offer both a libertarian theory and a compatibilist (success) theory.

Independent Justification Thesis (+ semantic agnosticism): Semantic agnosticism (which maybe should have been called “referential agnosticism”) is the considerably less well known view on which one is agnostic about whether terms like ‘free will’ and ‘moral responsibility’ have incompatibilist reference-fixing elements. By itself, semantic agnosticism doesn’t allow one to sidestep the compatibility debate. The core of the sidestep move is an appeal to the independent justification thesis, i.e., the view that whatever the reference-fixing content is for these terms, the practices, attitudes, and inferences characteristic of responsibility can be justified on grounds independent of those typically regarded as at stake in incompatibility debates (e.g., whether we have libertarian agency). [Analogs here include things like talk or race, marriage, and folk psychology—lots of folks think there is good reason to continue to think it is worthwhile to have organizations like the NAACP, spousal health insurance coverage, and talk about depression, despite the dubious status of things like biological race, marriage as property exchange, and the predictive status of folk psychology.] On this view, whether we call our theory “a theory of responsibility” or “a theory of responsibility*” doesn’t matter so much as the practical consequences are unaffected. So long as we can more or less keep blaming as we have been, and attributing forms of agency sufficient to support such practices, the incompatibility debate is mostly inert, except for bookkeeping purposes.

Agnostic Autonomism (AA) has the advantage of preserving our commitment to our being responsible but requires multiple ontologies of agency. If one doesn’t find both accounts plausible, it looks like it is still going to matter how the compatibility debate turns out.

The Independent Justification Thesis (IJT) has the advantage of a single picture about our practical commitments, with theoretical commitments that vary (or, perhaps more accurately, are “translated” or “framed” differently) depending on how the reference question sorts out. But that also means more weight on the question of just how much our practices and attitudes can be captured by the independent justification. So, whatever one’s story is about the independent justification (whether consequentialist, contractualist, virtue theoretic, or what have you), it better be good.

Another strategy would be to deny that the compatibility debate as ordinarily understood is coherent or well-rendered. I take it that something like this is the idea behind Ted Honderich’s view, and Saul Smilansky’s “fundamental dualism,” about which there is more discussion here.

Are there other strategies out there? What do you think about these strategies? Are there reasons to favor one over another? Is the compatibility debate sufficiently mined that it is (dialectically, philosophically, otherwise) useful to try to sidestep compatibility issues?

10/13/2013

(As comments and email give me more info, I'll be updating this post off and on during the week. If you see an oversite or erroneous info—especially omission of your book!—feel free to email me directly at <mrvargas@usfca.edu> or comment below, as you prefer. Ideally, give me <author, title, year of pub>. Thanks.)

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This is one of those “sociology of the profession” posts that Real Philosophers should scrupulously avoid reading, because of its déclassé nature. So, read on my friends.

A little more than four years ago, at the Garden of Forking paths blog, I wrote up something on the most frequently cited free will (and moral responsibility-oriented) monographs (in English) published between 1980-2005. Making use of The Google, in its then-recently launched “GoogleScholar” guise I generated a list of citation counts. Like all citation counts, these things are fallible and limited in various ways. However, citation counts do give some (imperfect) sense about which ideas have been influential, for good or ill.

So, I’ve decided to update the monograph list, partly out of curiosity about whether there have been interesting or notable changes, and if so, what that might say about the state of Ye Olde Free Will World. An even more telling list might be one that looked at journal articles and citation impact, since that's where so much of the action is in the field. My bet is some high citation figures on my list below would be much less well-represented on such a list, but that other figures would go up by a large margin.

Anyway, the observations below are something of a prelude to a forthcoming post about what counts as a position or a parameter in the literature. Before you make the jump, I invite you to ask yourself what you think the most heavily cited books are, and which books have climbed the most in citations over the past five years. After the list, I have some observations and thoughts about the details.

10/09/2013

You might have heard that I have a new book out. On a per-page basis, it is one of the better deals out there among the new books on free will and moral responsibility. However, as T-Dog has rightly noted, one of the suboptimal features of the book for ballers like ourselves is that many of the Big Payoffs of the book are buried in the second half of the book. So, I want to take the opportunity here to foreground one of the features of the account in the book, and to talk about some potential consequences of it (i.e., stuff not in said book).

The idea I have in mind arises from a broadly anti-“atomistic” or anti-individualist strand of thinking in the book, which holds that we theorists of responsibility spend too much time thinking about individual features of agent, and not enough about agents in contexts. The anti-atomist idea gets developed in different ways, including an account of how to think about the capacities underpinning freedom and responsibility, but also in the idea that moral ecology is important. By moral ecology, I mean the circumstances that support and enable exercises of agency in ways that respect and reflect a concern for morality. I argue that moral ecology matters a great deal for responsible agency, both in its development but also in its ongoing effectiveness.

I’m inclined to think that questions about moral ecology are partly questions of political philosophy and our obligations to other agents. But, there are also some meat and potatoes issues in interpersonal responsibility and legal responsibility that seem to me to arise when we focus greater attention on moral ecology. I want to reflect on one instance where the ecological conditions of responsibility matter—deprivation cases (think: economic, but presumably the basic ideas generalize). To put it bluntly, can poverty make people less responsible for the bad things they do?

2. Therefore, we epistemic inferiors should also regard View L as awesome/lame

There are, of course, lots of ways to refine the basic argument. But, I take it that we all accept some version of this as a matter of ordinary belief management. (Imagine I go on to mutter words like "testimony" and "epistemic division of labor" and "doxastic economy") The most familiar case is individual. My views about the effectiveness of organic pest management is shaped by a friend of mine who does this stuff for a living. More prosaically, my sense about the plausibility of, say, Darwinism is parasitic on what biologists and philosophers of science tell me (my beliefs adapt to what they say, so to speak), and my sense about whether Toyota Siennas are better than Honda Odysseys is shaped by what my betters at Consumer Reports tell me.

Now let's add a temporal dimension to the picture. Should we care what our future epistemic betters will think? Suppose the philosophers of the future will be even smarter and more epistemically awesome than we are. I suspect something like this is very likely to be true. They will know more stuff than we know, they will stand on the shoulders of taller giants, and they will have the benefits of whatever cognitive enhancements the tech and pharmaceutical companies of the world figure out between now and then. Plus, the Flynn Effect.

So what? Well, I wonder whether there are interesting consequences for how we think about some current philosophical debates.

I'm supposed to be blogging this month. Here's the plan: I'll try to post something roughly once a week, and reply as I can to the comments from folks who take the time to patiently explain why I'm wrong about stuff. At some point in the second half of this month, Kelly McCormick (Washington & Jefferson) will do a guest Featured Author post, which will actually contain Real Philosophy, as opposed to whatever it is that I'll be posting about.

I'm just guessing here, but I'll probably post some speculative musings about the sociology of the profession, make some unfair ad hominem arguments about libertarians, try to convince you that you don't understand Derk's view, and argue that the rise of normative theorizing related to free will has been way more pronounced than most people realize.